Hello everyone!  My name's Rainy (anyway that's what my friends call me), and I live in the midwestern US.  I love crafty projects and sculpting, and though I usually tend towards polymer clay, I've had a craving for papier mache lately, and I wanted to do a quick cheap project that didn't involve all the hoops I jump through when making a polymer sculpt.  Well, it didn't go quickly at all, but my unipig is as cheap as they come, hee.  Here's a montage of her taken with my crummy little camera:

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e189/ … celain.jpg

Obviously, her hair is not PM.. it's some nylon I clipped from a hair scrunchie got at a thrift store.  Her eyes are half-drops of clear polyester resin with painted backs (I use resin eyes in a lot of my critter sculptures and I think the bit of cost and work to make them is well worth it).  She's mostly newspaper and junkmail on a wire frame.  I wet-sanded to give her a nice smooth surface, and then sponged with gesso thickened with cornstarch to give her an overall uniform texture.   And for paste I used flour gravy with bleach and salt added, which brings me to my big question:

What's the longest that a flour-based PM piece can be expected to last?  I gave her a bleach-solution dousing before I painted her, and I hope to put a spray sealant on her after she's dried a few more days.  I'd like to add some borax to my next PM project, but I don't know if I should have a lot of faith in the longevity of flour-based work, and I would rather not work with white glue (I like PM because it's cheap!).  I heard somewhere that wallpaper paste was flour-based, or else I'd have tried it already; can someone tell me differently?